01
Open-source release
DeepSeek releases the open-weight reasoning model R1
DeepSeek publishes R1, R1-Zero, six distilled models, and its reinforcement-learning recipe, pushing open reasoning models into the frontier conversation.
CURATED TIMELINE · EDITORIAL EDITION
From Attention to Reasoning Models
Six releases map the dominant scaling story: the Transformer architecture, GPT-3’s in-context learning, ChatGPT’s mass-market interface, GPT-4’s multimodality, o1’s test-time compute, and DeepSeek-R1’s open-weight challenge.
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6 nodes2017.06—2025.01 · Editorially curated · Updated 2026-07-15
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The timeline
Reviewed event briefs and original editorial context, ordered to show how the story changed over time.
- 02Model release
OpenAI previews o1, a model trained to spend more time reasoning
OpenAI releases o1-preview, shifting frontier-model competition toward reinforcement learning and additional computation at inference time.
- 03Model release
OpenAI launches GPT-4 with staged access to text and image capabilities
OpenAI launches GPT-4 as a model that accepts text and images and emits text; text access begins through ChatGPT Plus and an API waitlist, while image input remains in limited partner testing.
- 04Product launch
OpenAI opens ChatGPT as a public research preview
OpenAI makes ChatGPT freely available as a research preview, using a GPT-3.5-series model trained with supervised dialogue data and reinforcement learning from human feedback.
- 05Research paper
GPT-3 demonstrates in-context learning at 175B parameters
OpenAI publishes GPT-3 research showing that a 175B-parameter model can switch tasks from instructions and a few examples in the prompt without updating its weights.
- 06Research paper
Google researchers publish the Transformer paper
The paper introduced an encoder–decoder architecture built entirely on attention, replacing recurrent computation with parallelizable self-attention.